


Virago

by Fiorenza_a



Category: The Professionals (TV 1977)
Genre: Period Typical Attitudes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-17 07:55:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29222049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fiorenza_a/pseuds/Fiorenza_a
Summary: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle...”Irina Dunn
Comments: 5
Kudos: 9





	Virago

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to the LiveJournal community Tea and Swissroll on 12th February 2019.  
> According to [feministsources](http://feministsources.blogspot.com/2013/08/if-it-were-lady-it-would-get-its-bottom.html), in 1979 Jill Posener snapped a picture of a billboard she chanced upon during a daily walk in London.

Virago

She was aware she shouldn't be here.

It was the worst type of cliché, to be seated at this bedside watching for the faintest flicker of returning consciousness. To feel her body respond to the subliminal and inappropriate thrill of holding this hand, so skilled at death and seduction.

She knew better, had educated herself better. In her place, this is what her mother would have done.

Except, her mother knew no better, could be taught no better - but _she_ did. And yet here she sat, her hand grasping his, waiting...

She'd been waiting from the start. Waiting for him to cancel, waiting for him to turn up, waiting for him to leave before the evening had even begun.

And she had defended him, to her mother, of all people. Her subservient, unliberated mother, who couldn't comprehend any objection to vowing, before God, her lifelong obedience to a belovèd husband. Who expected her to help with the washing up while her father and brother listened to the wireless. Who had started saving for a trousseau before puberty had visited its first curse upon her daughter's budding adolescence.

Her housewifely mother had been unaccommodating of the letdowns and cancellations. A man worth the name kept his dates, a woman sorted the wheat from the chaff that way, no good husband was ever cut from such unreliable cloth.

How did she explain to her mother that she did not share her dreams? Or her sexuality, come to that.

That marriage was not a thing she wanted. Not what she had seen of it, the gentle crushing of ambition under the weight of love, careworn before your years, responsible for other futures before you'd had a chance to grasp your own.

She hadn't wanted a trousseau, or a bottom drawer. The loneliness her mother feared for her, the declining years characterised by cats and antimacassars, was freedom in her eyes.

Maybe she _would_ buy a cat, maybe she _would_ festoon her home with antimacassars, but she'd never have to ask a man for the money to do it. To cajole and wheedle, the way she had seen her mother sometimes do, for a new hat or a superfluous frock.

Not that her father was a martinet, or indolent, she had to concede. Her mother had never washed the car, or mowed the lawn, or carried heavy luggage. When her mother had broken the heel from her shoe coming home from the newly-arrived supermarket, her father had taken her out to replace the shoes and invest in a smart new basket-on-wheels. As far as she knew, her mother had never been to the bank or worried about the bills. Or put the dustbins out.

That was all 'men's work', and her mother didn't understand how it diminished her not to do it. It was hard to argue with that blank incomprehension, which had built a secure and comfortable home, and borne two children safely to adulthood. How did she argue that her mother had been kept from genuine responsibility in the face of those achievements?

And how did she make plain, in the presence of such unadorned comprehension, the baroque complexities of her own desires? That she swooned as much for Margaret Lockwood's highwayman as she did for James Mason's?

Her mother understood lesbianism, apparently 'there was one at the library'. She wore tweed and sensible shoes. Her mother liked her, despite her propensity for smoking a pipe at the bus stop. But it wasn't natural, according to her mother. Only, they couldn't help it - and it wasn't like the men - lesbians weren't a danger to young boys. It was more of a handicap, like the kids with callipers, and you wouldn't take against one of those poor mites for something they couldn't help, would you?

She hadn't told Bodie about Margaret Lockwood either, but Bodie had guessed. Like James Mason's highwayman, he had too keen an empathy with women. Bodie caught the nuances his partner missed. Caught the bullets he missed too.

What did a liberated woman do when a compassionate man took a bullet in front of her? When he lay, crumpled and bleeding, in the doorway of a restaurant without expectation of comfort? When his partner had ditched him on her doorstep and sped furiously into the freezing night? When he had stood on the pavement, eyes following the taillights into the darkness, the air searing into his lungs, shivering in his suit?

For the first time since her liberation she had questioned whether men truly were the enemy, or whether they had become trapped in a prison of their own making.

What did a liberated woman do, when the human thing was to stand by this man who would wake to shattered bones and shattered dreams? For she had understood Bodie too, caught the nuances his partner missed.

Had seen the frosting of tears on his eyelashes, and made sure they had melted away in the heat of her car before they got to the restaurant.

What did a liberated woman do when she realised her oppressor was made of flesh and blood? Nothing she had read had prepared her for that revelation. She thought of her father, the bedtimes and bath times he had missed. The afterschool games in the park, the childhood fevers he must have fretted over leaving, the growing awkwardness she had sensed, as her body had blossomed to womanhood, and he no longer knew how to cuddle his little girl. The sentimental waltz they had shared on her sixteenth birthday and the walk down the aisle they would never make.

Her mother would comfort her father the day that realisation dawned, without self-consciousness or guilt, understanding what he felt in a way she never could. Emancipation was a blade driven between them, the sword was good and true, but double edged.

She knew, if she cared to investigate, what her mentors would tell her, that she had grown accustomed to her chains, to the point where she no longer felt them. That she must raise her consciousness, learn to bestride the world as men did, taking what she wanted. There were men like that, but her father wasn't one of them.

Neither was her brother, who'd sneaked in to help with the washing up, and knocked down any boy who affronted her.

Maybe liberated women held the hand of the men they cared for, without worrying about their feminist credentials. Maybe a liberated woman could let a man hold the door open for her, if she needed it, if it was polite - and maybe sometimes she could hold the door open for him, without worrying that it made her servile.

And maybe the real fights needed to be fought together, the way her mother and father did, as partners.

And maybe this man needed _his_ partner, more than he needed any woman.

A hesitant, soft-soled shoe squeaked against the floor behind her, and she turned to see an ashen faced man.

Liberated women didn't live to be needed, that much she had no quarrel with, so she relinquished her place to the chauvinist in patched jeans as obediently as any oppressed woman ever had.

The ashen faced man sank into her vacated seat and sat, staring at the empty hand resting against the bedcovers. He sat there for a long time, as if mired in indecision. Then he reached out and took the hand in his own, bringing it up to his cheek, so that it brushed against the fall of his dishevelled curls, waiting for the faintest flicker of returning consciousness.

She left them then, liberated women didn't need to be noticed by men. Yes, she was swathed in invisible chains, but so were they - and it had nearly cost them everything.

In all the shock and confusion, she hadn't given a thought to her car, left in the restaurant car park. So she waited in competent isolation at the bus stop, as any independent woman should, for a bus to take her back to where Bodie had been shot. She hadn't reported Bodie's injury to CI5, she supposed the hospital must have - or the police - they had both responded to the shooting - but she had gone with Bodie in the ambulance to the hospital.

Opposite the bus stop, a cavalier billboard brashly proclaimed that if Fiat's latest offering 'were a lady, it would get its bottom pinched'. Some outraged feminist had written underneath 'if this lady was a car, she'd run you down'.

Yesterday she would have been proud of the sisterhood, today she had been a witness to violence and wondered if blood ever begat anything but blood.

She thought of her mother, her father and her brother. She thought of Bodie and the ashen faced man at his bedside.

"It's not simply that women deserve better," she reproached the billboard before the approaching bus blotted it from her vision, "it's that we all do, every single one of us."

END

**Author's Note:**

> [Virago (Press)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virago_Press)   
>  [Vow of Obedience](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_vows#Anglican)   
>  [Bottom Drawer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_chest)   
>  [The Wicked Lady](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wicked_Lady)   
>  [Callipers](https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/meet-debra-the-historic-collection-box)


End file.
